At 5:20 p.m. one day last week, a delegate burst from a closed hall in Jamaica's University College of the West Indies, where the British West Indies federation conference was meeting, and cried: "Trinidad wins!" With the choice of a capital, a new nation was born, the Western Hemisphere's first since the creation of Panama 53 years ago.
The former British colonies—11 main islands with 8,000 sq. mi. of land and 3,000,000 people sprawled across 1,500 miles of the Caribbean Sea—had in earlier weeks picked a name for the nation: The West Indies. Now, with the touchy trading over the capital accomplished, only the formalities remain: the Queen's appointment of the Governor General this summer; the election of the first legislature early in 1958, capped by the selection of the first Prime Minister.
Even the choice of the capital by an 11-5 vote represented a declaration of independence. A royal commission from London had plumped for Barbados, but prosperous Trinidad had the most to offer its smaller, poorer neighbors, and copped the prize. Port-of-Spain's No. 1 Calypso Singer King Sparrow chanted:
Barbadians are sorry, but Sparrow's glad
The West Indian capital is in Trinidad!
They tried their best to wreck this thing,
Now they've got to listen to the Calypso King.
Shaped like a thousand-mile boot lying on its side, with Jamaica at the top, the Leeward Islands at the heel. Trinidad at the toe, The West Indies unites:
¶ Jamaica, which has more than half the land area and population of the new nation—4,411 sq. mi., 1,500,000 people. The island is pulling itself up by a pair of bootstraps labeled tourism and bauxite. But it still has more than 100,000 unemployed. Says Socialist Chief Minister Norman Washington Manley, 63, the half-Irish, half-Negro dean of West Indian statesmen: Jamaica "is one of the problem areas of the world."
¶ The eight tiny Leeward Islands, 1,000 miles to the east, of which Antigua (108 sq. mi.) is the largest. Site of Alexander Hamilton's birthplace (Nevis, 1757) and Britain's first toehold in the Spanish Main (St. Kitt's, 1623), the Leewards are historically rich, economically poor.
¶ The four Windward Islands (Dominica, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, Grenada), which are also small, beautiful and backward.
¶ Barbados, 166 sq. mi. of sugar cane jampacked with 228,000 people, a population of 1,475 to the square mile. Led by stolid, dour Prime Minister Grantley Adams, 58, a onetime Socialist militant who softened in office. Barbados is the loyal "little Britain" of the islands.